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Schools Turning From Teaching the Trades

In a carpentry shop at Ralph R. McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island the other morning, a class of 18 seniors put the finishing touches on their final projects for the year -- filing and chiseling, making mailboxes and small round tables. Their teacher, a cabinetmaker by trade, moved busily around the work benches, helping with a measurement here and there.

But there was a degree of resignation to go with all the eager work: the carpentry class of 2000 will be McKee's last, and in closing, it will be joining the school's list of recent casualties. In the last two years, the school has shut down the plumbing and electrical shops. The electrical shop, now a graphic arts laboratory filled with computers, was closed after the teacher retired and the school could not find a qualified replacement.

McKee High is not alone. Facing a changed marketplace, dwindling enrollment, years of fiscal neglect and immense pressure to raise academic standards and prepare students for college, vocational schools and programs in New York and across the country are struggling to survive and rushing to reinvent themselves. In every state, vocational schools -- many of them no longer using the word vocational in their names -- are in some phase of transition, either because of intense pressure to adapt to new demands or because educators have seized the moment as an opportunity to turn them around.

At Thomas A. Edison High School in Queens, the plumbing shop closed four years ago; George Westinghouse High School in Brooklyn is closing the last of its jewelry-making shops this year and phasing out its carpentry program. Fifteen years ago, there were nearly 30 teachers of machine shop in the city's trade schools; now, there are none. And the number of freshmen entering city vocational schools has slid by more than a quarter in the last three years alone. The schools have turned away from the building trades even as industry officials have complained about a shortage of skilled workers in plumbing and carpentry.

For generations, McKee and schools like it sent legions of students into the everyday, reliable work world of plumbing, electrical installation, auto repair, hairdressing and carpentry. In their glory, the city's vocational schools were stepping stones for immigrants, as well as for the children of plumbers and electricians and others, to get a good job and get ahead.

''It's like any degenerative illness,'' said Chuck Merten, who taught plumbing at Edison until the shop was closed and he moved to one of the school's few remaining electrical shops. ''You go along not paying much attention to the aches and pains, and then you wake up one day and you say, 'Oh my God. I'm really sick.' I think that's where we are.''

The condition of vocational education across the country runs a wide gamut, from programs that are dying and fading to schools in a state of confusion to some that have begun to thrive as they redefine their missions, education experts say.

Some schools, like those in Fairfax County, Va., have eliminated vocational education altogether.

''We took vocational education out of everything we do in this county,'' said John Witmann, administrator of the Chantilly Academy for Engineering and Scientific Technology in Fairfax, which used to be called the Chantilly Vocational School. ''It no longer exists.''

In the five years since the school was revamped, enrollment at Chantilly, which offers several concentrations of study in engineering and health and human services, has tripled, to 1,000 students from 300, Mr. Witmann said.

Four years ago, schools in Ohio, which had a long tradition of teaching trades like welding, masonry and electricity, began to eliminate many shop classes, folding them into more general concentrations of study and allowing students more time for academic courses, Ohio education officials said. That state, like New York, has recently required all students to meet tougher academic requirements.

''There is an increasing view that vocational education is not an appropriate role for a high school education,'' said James R. Stone III, deputy director of the National Center for Research in Career and Technical Education, a federally financed research center based in St. Paul. ''It is increasingly difficult to sustain the traditional programs.''

In New York City, the range of explanations for the decline of its once vaunted trade schools is wide: budget cuts and the sense that the schools had become dumping grounds for students not smart enough to go to college; waning interest among youngsters worried about making their way in a high-technology economy; the difficulty of keeping teachers who, in a booming marketplace, have no trouble finding high-paying work.

Things have not been made easier for the vocational schools in recent years as the state has toughened its academic standards for all high school students. The roughly 25,000 students at the city's vocational schools, who used to balance their shop work with a more modest academic curriculum tailored to their trades, will soon have to pass the same statewide English and other exams as all other students to earn their diplomas.

For many, there is the sense that the future of the city's 18 vocational schools is in peril, and that something legendary could be lost.

Schools like Harry Van Arsdale High in Brooklyn, Edison in Queens and Alfred E. Smith in the Bronx were once known as great training grounds for skilled craftsmen. They had a prestige in the blue-collar world; even before students earned their diplomas, stamped with vocational endorsements in their trades, they had jobs or apprenticeships lined up.

Teachers at several vocational schools that have eliminated programs say they still get calls from plumbers, carpenters or heating and cooling companies looking for graduates of the city's vocational schools.

''We had graduates working all over Queens and Brooklyn,'' said Mr. Merten, who was a plumber before taking the Edison teaching job 25 years ago. ''They had four years of training and an endorsement from a city school. That carried a lot of weight.''

Some schools, like Queens Vocational High School in Long Island City, have held on to the traditional skilled trades. They have refused to close down their shops, and in the process made what they characterize as a principled and practical stand on the belief that no matter how high-tech the world gets, someone is still going to have to know how the toilet's plumbing works. Unlike many of the city's vocational schools, it has not lost students.

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''I've always liked working with my hands,'' said Byron Mendoza, a senior at Queens Vocational who has studied plumbing there for four years. ''It's hard work, but it's a good trade.''

Down the hall from the plumbing shop, where Mr. Mendoza was cutting and soldering pipes and testing them for leaks, Hugo Cruz, a senior studying electrical installation, was finishing up a wiring job on a 220-volt control panel, his final project for the year.

''You know how they say you have a natural-born talent?'' he asked. ''That's me. I love this job. I like to have pride in what I do. If one day I build a whole building, I'll be able to look at it and say I did that.''

Queens Vocational, which opened in 1929, still offers a full complement of plumbing, electrical installation, cosmetology, stenography and other traditional subjects. It has one of only two plumbing shops left in the city's school system -- the other is at Alfred E. Smith Vocational School in the South Bronx.

''My feeling is that we are a vocational school and that is our mission,'' said Steve Serber, the principal.

But it has not been easy. For the vast majority of the city's 18 vocational schools, the challenge is perhaps best summed up by a phrase on the brochure McKee uses to promote its newly designed computer technology program: ''adapt or perish.''

For some schools, like McKee, whose 600 students are half as many as it had in 1981, adapting has amounted to a complete overhaul.

The old machine shop will soon be used as a robotics shop. The sheet-metal shop, the city's last when it was closed in the 1980's, was turned into a guidance office. Fiber optics, computer networking and graphic design, courses with a focus on the latest technology, have taken the place of the traditional trades. The plumbing, carpentry and electrical trades will be folded into one broader program called construction technology, which the school hopes will draw more students.

Many other New York City vocational schools, like Edison and Grace H. Dodge Vocational High School in the Bronx, now promote themselves as academic institutions and emphasize college preparation, with opportunities for vocational training sounding almost like an afterthought.

Some educators in vocational schools support the new focus on college and academics, saying it will broaden the students' knowledge, better prepare them for work and give them an education that, with both academics and vocational training, offers them ''two for the price of one.''

''I think we're going to have to redefine what a high school experience is,'' said Steve Feldman, director of the school-to-career program at the Board of Education, which helps coordinate vocational programs and courses.

Mr. Feldman said he would support a set of proposals now under consideration by the state's Board of Regents, which in 1996 mandated the new high school graduation requirements, allowing vocational students greater flexibility in their academic course work toward a diploma, and possibly offering credit for courses related to the trades that also prepare them for exams in the five academic subjects.

Acknowledging the predicament of vocational schools that have had to steal time from trades to help prepare their students for the Regents exams, a panel of state education officials presented recommendations to the Regents last Wednesday on ways to allow the students more time in their shop and trade courses.

Under the 1996 graduation policy, which will be phased in by 2004, all public high school students must pass exams in English, math, science, global studies and American history and government.

Mr. Serber of Queens Vocational, like other principals at vocational schools, has searched for ways to bring academics into the shops. Several days a week, English teachers work in the shops with plumbing students, and he has asked the shop teachers to include more writing in their lesson plans, like developing instruction manuals for electrical wiring projects and plumbing jobs.

''We are going to try our hardest,'' Mr. Serber said. ''But it may get to a point where the kids whose skills are poor have to leave.''